From the #Cloud – Let’s change the semantics, a whole new kind of “prem”

The terminology associated to the Cloud confuses those who don’t live and breathe it, (and let’s face it, some of those that do live and breathe Cloud are also pretty confused… 🙂

For me the biggest confusion has been and will remain to be the concept of something being “on-prem”. I have plenty of people plead with me to explain how “on-prem” style infrastructure deployed into an IaaS service (such as Azure Virtual Machines) is not still “on-prem”.

I’ve tried to re-contextualise “on-prem” as being a licencing model, positioning it as an antipode to SaaS. No dice.

If you frequent my blog you will have seen me use the term “Traditional IT” to describe the (now) old method for standing up IT services within the corporate boundary. Simple and effective. I can position as “traditional IT” versus “Cloud, taking “on-prem” out of the equation – this gets traction with most folks I speak to.

Recently I’ve been using a new term that seems to work universally that is along the same lines as “traditional IT” – “their prem”.

“Hold on Seb!” I hear you screaming at your displays, “what now?”

“Their prem“.

It’s a term I’m using to describe IaaS deployments. It’s on-prem (in a licencing context) but not deployed to “your prem” (a la traditional IT) it’s deployed to somebody elses’ “prem”. In the case of Azure Virtual Machines, Microsoft’s “prem”.

Simple. It’s not your-prem, it’s “their-prem”.

Love it or hate it, it’s descriptive and easy to articulate, just the way I like it…